The meta-positioning habit of mind | Hacker News Reader

The meta-positioning habit of mind

theconvivialsociety.substack.com

85 pointslongdefeat40 comments

Here's my theory on why “discussion detaches from the issue at hand, turning into meta-debates about how we respond to the responses of others, etc.”:

I think it's a battle for common knowledge (See: https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=2410). Suppose there are two groups, A and B, having a different stance on a given issue. On social media, it's not enough to voice an opinion about the issue at hand. Because the nature of social networks make it easy for opinions that are globally rare to be overrepresented (see: The Majority Illusion In Social Networks — https://arxiv.org/abs/1506.03022). Therefore, if you're from group A, you want to make sure that your opinion is common knowledge, but also the fact that you're shunning indivduals from group B (to signal that they are a minority or on the wrong side) common knowledge as well. That's why the discussion drifts quickly into those meta-debates.

Yup, consensus reality is the other term I have heard used to describe this.

It’s dialectical thinking and phrasing, described in its most basic state in the modern era by Fichte (commonly credited to Hegel).

Disciplining oneself to reject all dialectic (harder than it sounds) can go a long way to freeing oneself from a wide variety of crafted narratives.

I think about the introduction of How to be an anti-racist that explicitly sets up a racist/anti-racist dialectic and effectively defines "racism" as "anti-blackism"

In any of these examples, it effectively creates a closed-loop definition, cutting off all external references or bases, where the definition of the dialectical terms is set by whomever happens to hold the most power and influence in the topic at hand.

Yes, because whoever controls the meaning of words wins: https://wyclif.substack.com/p/a-little-game-theory-on-discur...

I'm not sure if anybody wins in this case.

Which is the core of why these power games are so dumb yet dangerous.

Divisive narrative battles seem to spiral out in a vicious cycle until a group splits into tribes/echo chambers. The large battles continue until one side is conquered (materially - via financial or physical means). And even if a side wins, it is now suspect to splintering and the process starts all over again.

I imagine this pattern is very old and it's only now on these rapid time scales enabled by the internet are we able to clearly recognize and discuss it more broadly.

Any resources on rejecting dialectic?

Vimalakirti sutra

EDIT: for something more recent: Zen Mind, Beginners Mind by Shunryu Suzuki

Anything a bit more recent?

Like, Marx-recent?

Marx is the opposite of the kind of reference you want if you want to reject dialectical thinking. That was Marx's whole deal.

Ah.

What I wanted to say was:

I know a bunch of people who argument from Marx perspective of dialectical thinking.

But the comment I replied to gave me the impression, dialectical thinking was fundamentally flawed.

So, I was interested where this flaw lies and how it might proof Marx wrong.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31479769

Another work that is more formal is Maximus’s Ambigua, written largely in response to Origen’s Neoplatonism. Origen was rather fixated on the idea of either precarnate good vs. fallen flesh (those are your two options, another version of Gnosticism basically).

Maximus offers the solution of transcending simple dialectics because free will allows one to choose from more than one good.

In general, discomfort with ambiguity and free will reveals a lot about a person, society, organization, etc.

René Girard, in "I See Satan Fall Like Lightning," effectively (in my opinion) mapped out how dialectical narratives underpin the process of scapegoating victims in a society for sacrifice / purging via revolutionary violence. There is a deep connection between dialectics and their basis in accusatory networks.

If you mean "against dialectic" (havent read TFA yet), a famous case was made by Karl Popper:

https://www.vordenker.de/ggphilosophy/popper_what-is-dialect...

Michel Foucault

https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com is new to me, anyone have any thoughts on them?

He's carrying the torch of Ivan Illich, basically. It's a reference to 'Tools for Conviviality'. Illich himself was a minor celebrity in the 70s/80s/90s and appeared on the front cover of The Whole Earth Quarterly or the Coevolution Quarterly once, I forget which issue, but it was about his 'Silence is a Commons' essay. He was a chemist, and a Catholic theologian, and a great humanist philosopher. He sort of ran a commune in Mexico in his later years. I miss him.

edit, personal note: I was a big fan as a teenager. My dad has all the Whole Earth issues and had a few Illich books in the basement and I really enjoyed Tools for Conviviality a lot. As well as Medical Nemesis, To Hell With Good Intentions, and Deschooling Society. That one almost made me drop out of high school.

I've been liking reading his musings on technology and it's effects - with an emphasis on the effects that social media is having on society - essentially making us less convivial.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Be_Here_Now_(book)

Another revealing term for a phrase like 'anti-anti-antivax' is Orwell's double-plus-ungood. It's in line with a standard tactic in propaganda: Take a complex topic, reduce it to simple statement even a small child could understand, then repeat, repeat, repeat. Twitter is the ideal tool for this approach, with its character-limited format. No wonder that state/corporate PR outfits (aka 'the media') and politicians congregate there.

The article does have some good advice, though: Jacobs recommends extending our temporal bandwidth through a deliberate engagement with the past through our reading as well as a deliberate effort to bring the more distant future into our reckoning.

This is ideal for addressing the vaccination issue. The first question to ask of any self-styled 'vaccine expert' would be, "What are the 100 top vaccines that have been introduced in the past 100 years, and what are some examples of success and failure in these efforts"? (What I'd expect from Twitter is cherry-pickers finding the best and worst examples to push their own particular agenda, rather than an across-the-board debate).

Granted, answering that question in detail would take a whole book, although wikipedia has a decent introduction:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_human_vaccines

Some of the ancient religious views on illness seem to be playing a role here as well, i.e. illness is a divine punishment for human sin, so anyone effecting cures is clearly an agent of dark Satanic power, who should be burned at the stake etc. None of that excuses pharmaceutical manufacturers who run dirty production lines and end up contaminating their vaccines, however:

"Viral contamination in biologic manufacture and implications for emerging therapies (2020)" https://www.nature.com/articles/s41587-020-0507-2

This particular conversation typically conflates two separate questions: 1) is a person's decision to get a vaccine based on (however defined) accurate knowledge of vaccines and how they work? and 2) how can we ensure that individual rights to choose one's own medical and preventative treatments are protected regardless of the perceived answer to #1?

3) is it okay for society to collectively make decisions that reduce the liberty of an individual if that individual makes choices that endanger everyone else?

> 3) is it okay for society to collectively make decisions that reduce the liberty of an individual if that individual makes choices that endanger everyone else?

I believe you mean: "Is it okay for society to collectively make decisions that reduce the liberty of an individual and endanger their life if that individual makes choices that endanger everyone else". Because for the covid vaccines at least there's ample evidence they're not without nontrivial risk: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-10928-z

It's also very problematic to suggest that a human in their natural state of being poses a risk to society at large.

> It's also very problematic to suggest that a human in their natural state of being poses a risk to society at large.

Problematic is kind of an overloaded term, so it's not clear to me exactly what you mean here.

It can certainly be true that "a human in their natural state of being poses a risk to society at large." There are a lot of example of that (e.g. unvaccinated people with naive immune systems allowing the resurgence of disease, violent psychopaths).

That fact certainly can cause problems where the contradictions between the sloganized-forms of certain social axioms need to be resolved.

Many (most?) "natural" states and activities of human beings are considered unacceptable in society even without posing existential risk to other humans (you might find anything adjacent to reproduction in particular quite a minefield). Should vaccination be any exception?

I suspect if we tried to define "natural" we'd find the term meaningless and applied very selectively where it suits someone's agenda.

If the difference between telling people to put some clothes on & avoid sex in public vs. forcefully injecting chemicals into their bodies is not clear, I’m not sure what to tell you.

Not telling people but incarcerating them, and one of those "natural states" can't even hold a candle to the other in terms of risk.

Or are we now switching up "natural" to mean how what we take into our bodies differs from our ancestors at various times in the past? Then compared to the amount of microplastics, PFAS, etc. a modern human anywhere on the planet consumes (inhales, absorbs) a couple of vaccine shots strikes me as truly insignificant.

I do not recall any serious proposals to force vaccines into anyone. Restrictions on what you may do when unvaccinated are not forcing you to get injected, they are simply the way society balances the liberty of the people who do not want to be infected by you against your liberty not to be medicated against your will.

Society is most certainly okay making decisions that endanger an individual's life and limit their liberty even for choices that did not endanger anyone else's life (cf. prison system), vaccination is small beans by comparison.

https://www.theatlantic.com/podcasts/archive/2021/03/jacobso...

“The Jacobson v. Massachusetts decision made clear that the government could mandate vaccination, arguing that collective good sometimes outweighs individual rights. But…”

The “but” is explained near the end of the transcript: eugenics. Forced sterilization by government mandate. Virginia law: “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” Since overturned. (It happens to this day tho not by mandate: several Canadian Native women have recent and ongoing legal cases wrt unlawful medical treatment.)

The government theoretically has a mandate to do its best for the population taken as a whole. Smallpox was literally killing one third[0] of the population! Damn straight that the government enforced vaccination to achieve herd immunity; the alternative was ruination.

Over a third of nurses now intend to quit. Case rates surged high enough to break our healthcare system. A crazy number of people died, families broken, worker knowledge and skills dying with them. Continuing global supply chain failures. Economies are crashing. We are paying dearly for not remembering Jacobson.

[0] https://biosecurity.fas.org/resource/factsheets/smallpox.htm

it's nothing meta about political opposition in discourse

Meta comment:

First HN article for me where Facebook Meta's co-opting of "meta" as its corporate identity had caused me to double-take in confusion, that the title was not in fact concerning Facebook.

Bloggers love to invent words with “meta” in them.

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